Letters

It's not necessary to agree with every position taken by Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen et al to find David Edgar's piece on "Defectors from the Left" ("With friends like these ...", April 19) simplistic. Hitchens's and Cohen's stance on intervention in Iraq may well have been mistaken, but it was driven by honourable motives. They are also not the only liberals and socialists deeply repelled by political alliances with fundamentalist anti-democratic and anti-secular forces, alliances that have led the less principled on the left to turn their back on those, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of the screenplay of Theo Van Gogh's film Submission, who would once have secured unflinching support. Hitchens and Cohen are a world apart from the political right in their continuing commitment to the old radical priorities of organised labour, wealth redistribution, feminism and freedom of expression.

John MedhurstHove, East Sussex

It is bizarre and depressing in equal measure that David Edgar places Ed Husain, a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, in the company of left-defectors. Only the most eurocentric mind, submerged in patronising exoticism, can cast Hizb ut-Tahrir's extreme conservative social policy and anti-democratic politics as somehow "left", just because they also oppose US imperialism: to Muslims and in Muslim countries they are very much of the religious right, and do not - contrary to Edgar's insinuation - represent the economically disenfranchised.

Peter McKennaLiverpool

Scams galore

Henry Hitchings comes to the conclusion that "English-speakers are afflicted with a peculiar myopia about the extent to which their language is borrowed ("Can we have a word?", April 19). In part, this is a denial of an imperial past ..." But he ignores the contribution made to contemporary English by the native language of what some would consider Britain's closest colony, Ireland. Some are obvious, such as "blarney", "brogue" and "colleen", but Daniel Cassidy, in How the Irish Invented Slang, makes a strong case for a large number of other current English words, for instance "galore", "knack", "quirk", "scam", "slum" and "smithereens", having their origins in the Irish language.

Stephen ButcherTullaghgarley, Ballymena, Co Antrim

The first detectives

Neither Inspector Bucket nor Sergeant Cuff was the first detective in English fiction (Letters, April 19). For a start, there's Dickens's own Nadgett in Martin Chuzzlewit a decade earlier (1843), and Thomas Skinner's Richmond in Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer back in 1827. (Pedants might add William Godwin's Caleb Williams, 1794.) Wilkie Collins, too, wrote detective stories before The Moonstone. But I sympathise with both Clive Porter and Kate Summerscale ("The prince of sleuths", April 5). In writing an essay on the first detectives for my Great British Fictional Detectives encyclopaedia (published next September) I thought three times that I'd found the clearest candidate, but each time found someone from earlier. I could name the first woman detective, the first nurse detective, the first blind detective - even the earliest cycling detectives - but the first of any kind? The search continues.

Russell James Cheltenham

The real philosopher

In her review of A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones ("Reciprocal liberties", April 19), Joanna Briscoe states that Simone de Beauvoir "succeeded spectacularly at the Sorbonne at a time when few women were afforded the opportunity to study at all"; she goes on to mention Sartre as a fellow student. Simone de Beauvoir was indeed at the Sorbonne while Sartre was at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, but both obtained the agregation in philosophy in 1929, with Sartre placed first and de Beauvoir, the youngest philosophy agregee ever, second. The jury agreed, however, that, of the two, de Beauvoir was "the real philosopher".

Bruce Ross-SmithOxford

The great Leonard Blorenge

I was interested to read of Don DeLillo's comical non-German-reading German History Professor in Nick Lezard's piece on Clive James (Paperback choice, April 12), but he is surely merely a poor relation of an earlier academic titan, from Pnin, by Nabokov:

"Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French."

Shaun Lyon

Berkhamsted

Talking Cenci

Commenting on Coleridge's play Remorse, James Fenton writes: "Neither this nor any other English Romantic play survives in the modern theatrical repertoire" ("Things that have interested me", April 12). I seem to remember seeing Shelley's The Cenci at the Almeida Theatre, Islington, in 1985.

Diana FernandoWissett, Suffolk

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